Wow, pizza dough loves olive oil

Today's choices were the Fire-Roasted Tomato and Cabrales (Blue Cheese) Pizza and the Kansas City BBQ Chicken Pizza.

So, this time around I added an extra tablespoon of olive oil into the dough with extra salt as well. The dough stayed at home and as a result it had a completely different texture and flavour. Honestly the dough was like night and day. It was stickier, and was far more malleable. The only difficulty was getting it onto the grill. I had stretched it much thinner but as a result it made it more difficult to handle.

If you could have seen me trying to pick raw dough off of a hot grill and put it back into somewhat of an acceptable shape, you would have laughed.

The pizza ended up crispy, and flaky (due to the extra olive oil), it was paper thin but still held all the ingredients. I was actually afraid to cook the second pizza because the first one was so good.

Special NOTE: The dough is always stretched out onto polenta (corn grits) or corn meal if you want a finer crunch. I use the polenta and really like it.

This is the BBQ chicken pizza with grilled chicken, a mesquite BBQ sauce for the base, smoked mozzarella, spicy montery jack cheese, red onion and yellow bell pepper. Honestly, this pizza was good. It's definitely a recipe keeper.

This pizza was interesting and according to Robert, absolutely delicious. I am not a huge fan, or even any fan at all of blue cheese so while I could appreciate the wonderfulness of this pizza, it wasn't my favourite. This had slow roasted cherry tomatoes, a carmalized onion base, with blue cheese, pecans and cracked black pepper.

You may notice the absence of pizza in the middle. The book said to embrace holes. This was an example of too thin a crust. It got a little charred so I decided to crack it out and work around it.

Goal for next attempt:

Find a way to get the dough onto the grill a little more gracefully.

Magic Mushrooms Anyone!

Excited with my new project I decided that my first attempt should be the Classic Margherita and the Magic Mushroom Medley Pizza. (btw - not THOSE kind of magic mushrooms!).


My main goal was to test the crust and see if it can be easily cooked directly on the grill. The book made it look really simple, but I wasn't convinced.

The results:

It's crazy but true. The dough did not stick to the grill. Not even one little crum. As for taste/texture, the dough was okay, but sort of tasteless. I decided to add more olive oil and salt to the recipe next time. Also, the recipe I was using required you to mix the ingredients and let it sit at room temp for 24 hours. Three hours before use you have to flip the ball of dough. I actually brought the dough to work to flip it, but I think the room it was sitting in was a little chilly. This, I think, made the dough a little tough.

The proof...

This is the mushroom medley pizza with leeks, wild mushrooms, roasted garlic, camembert cheese with fresh thyme.

I forgot to take the picture before we ate the pizza. This is what was left! This is the Margherita pizza with fresh buffalo mozzeralla, tomato sauce and fresh basil from our garden.

Goal for next attempt:

Improve the texture and taste of the dough.

The 1-2-3 Technique for Grilled Pizza

Before I begin, I thought I would clarify two questions you may be asking yourself. The first being, why do this at all, and the second why go to all the trouble to blog it? The answer to the first question is simple. My obsession runs deep. Very very deep. As for the latter question, I think that everyone should know how to grill a beautiful tasty pizza and thought you may want to learn a few tips alongside me.

Obviously the book (which you should sign out at your local public library) goes into great detail about dough, sauce, accompaniments etc. However, the most important detail is the 2 part process of cooking the pizza on the BBQ.

Step one is to preheat the BBQ for a full 15-minutes. Turn the burners down to medium and put your raw dough directly onto the greased grill and shut the lid quickly. Cook for exactly 3 minutes and take off the dough.

At this point you flip it over onto a board and you dress your pizza. Any toppings that need to be cooked, need to be cooked first.

Turn off the middle burner, or one side of your BBQ. Put the topped pizza onto the side that has been turned off.

Cook with the lid down until hot and bubbly.

The Challenge

Anyone who knows me, knows of my love affair, or rather, obsession with pizza. Recently we acquired a book at the library called, "Pizza on the grill: 100 Feisty Fire-Roasted Recipes for Pizza & More" which was the inspiration for the challenge that was born. After drooling over the gorgeous pictures and descriptions I decided I needed to perfect the art of grilling pizza. One of the student pages took it one step further and challenged me to make all 52 (or so)pizza's in the book before the end of Labour Day weekend.

Always open to any excuse to eat pizza, I agreed to the challenge.

The rules.

1. Make all the pizzas in the book.
2. Take a picture for proof.

What follows is my progress...